


Conversation Begins with a Lie

by omiceti



Category: Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-16
Updated: 2011-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-24 16:10:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omiceti/pseuds/omiceti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have nothing to prove to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversation Begins with a Lie

The woman picking up a bowl of noodles at the counter seems familiar. You’ve seen her before, but it takes you a minute to place her: on your way back from the political history seminar that meets late on Tuesdays, leaning against the shadow of the residential hotel on Second Avenue. She’s the least garish of the hookers who work that block. Up close (because you always cross the street over there so you can avoid the weirdos outside the liquor store), you’re surprised by how small she is, and how sharp her gaze, more aware and less calculating than you’d expected, somehow.

The bench across from you is the only empty spot in the shop, not that there’s a lot of space at Mr. Chow’s even when it’s empty, and she looks annoyed at the realization, then sighs. “Okay?” she asks, gesturing, and you nod, trying not to slurp the tapioca in your bubble tea too loudly. Whores have to eat too, obviously, but you’re sort of afraid of her.

She sits down across from you and doesn’t smile. She’s tiny and wiry and intimidating and eats like she’s hungry. You are too, and you have a long day ahead of you still before your work-study shift starts at the library, so you eat in silence and try not to look at her too much.

You’re unsuccessful. There’s something arresting about her face, and the next time you steal a glance, she’s looking straight at you. You feel caught out, guilty, and embarrassed by the blush you can feel spreading up your cheekbones.

“See something you like?” she asks, smirking.

Jesus, it’s so humiliating. You’ve just been propositioned by a _prostitute_ because you’re too stupid to keep your eyes to yourself. Maybe. This is confusing. “You don’t look like a hooker,” you blurt, and immediately want to melt into the ugly plastic bench.

“You don’t look like an idiot,” she says, but she sounds more amused than angry.

You smile a little, then drop your eyes. Her fingernails are a little grimy. She has beautiful hands.

*

“There you go,” Angie whispers, coaxing, and your whole body convulses into the filthy bathroom door, and as you’re coming all you’re aware of is the smell of soy sauce and cooking oil and her breath against your ear and the way your entire being is concentrated in a quantum of wet heat trembling around her fingers.

She kisses the corner of your mouth. Somewhere in the barely-functioning back of your mind you remember that hookers don’t kiss, but you like her and this is already very strange, so you kiss her back and then you’re actually kissing, tasting like dumplings and tapioca. She’s a good kisser, delicate, and her fingers are moving again and the second orgasm sneaks up your spine, lifts out of you with a sigh.

She leans back, smiles a little, lets you zip up your jeans. You’re depending on the door to keep you up. “Oh my God,” you tell her. “I wasn’t – I only have ten dollars, and maybe some change –”

The look she gives you goes straight to center. “I didn’t say I was working,” she says, and pushes past you.

You wash your hands, for some reason, even though they haven’t been anywhere but her waist. By the time you stumble out of the bathroom, she’s gone.

*

You don’t see her around Second Avenue any more, but the hookers think it’s absolutely fucking hilarious that you ask about her. Jade, who wears six-inch platforms and sparkly fingernails and is almost definitely a man, suggests a bad date, casually, like the idea of Angie getting robbed or beaten or worse is no big deal, like you’re an idiot for caring about it.

You don’t think you are.

*

Eight months later you’re freezing your ass off on your way home from Diana’s apartment-warming party, twenty-something people crammed into a 300-square-foot studio somewhere west of Times Square, and you’re squinting against the knifing wind on your way to the Port Authority station when you see her, standing a little apart from a knot of women at a construction site on Eighth.

She’s wearing hardly any clothes, and doesn’t see you, or recognize you (and you guess there’s no reason she should, anyway), so by the time you’re close enough to say her name, it’s too late for her to get away from you. She looks like she wants to run anyway, but you’ve already attracted some attention from the little group of miserable-looking women in the cold, so Angie just stares at you, hard. She doesn’t look happy to see you at all. You wonder, dully, whether you’ve embarrassed her, or maybe put her in danger, you have no idea how this stuff works. You feel like an idiot, suddenly, and very young. Finally she lunges forward and grabs your wrist. “Come here,” she growls, and you stumble after her around the corner, little bits of broken glass and God knows what else crunching under your shoes.

The doorway she pulls you into is dark and smells like piss, but it’s out of the wind, at least. Out in the rats’ alley, harsh bluish light pools in circles on the patchy asphalt, as though afraid of the dark. In the dimness her eyes are huge and empty, like they’re pulling in all the other darknesses, and her fingers dig into your arm. You know there will be bruises there tomorrow.

“I just wanted to see if you were okay,” you tell her, “and it’s cold out, and maybe you could use my hat.” You’re babbling, but you catch a glimpse of something like surprise in her face. She pulls you forward roughly, and you lose your balance and fall against her, and she releases your wrist, tangles her left hand in your hair suddenly and she’s kissing you, her mouth hard and desperate against yours. It’s so surprising that you barely have time to kiss her back before she shoves you backward, against the wall, and something twists in the shadows on her face. “Fuck off,” Angie tells you, her voice edged with something frightening. “And don’t come back.”

Something glints briefly in her right hand. You swallow, throat suddenly feeling thick. “Okay,” you choke out, and your heart is pounding.

“I mean it,” Angie says, still with that voice, and you wonder whether she’s ever killed anyone with that knife. Probably best not to find out. “Okay,” you say, and mean it, hating the pleading whine that seems to have crept into your voice. “Okay. You won’t see me again.”

Angie nods, her face hard. “Yeah,” she says. “Now get the fuck out.”

You do.

On the train home, it suddenly occurs to you to wonder why Angie would be carrying a knife in the first place. That’s the night you first think that maybe you’d like to be a cop.

*

Ross is your mentor, more or less, and he’s the one who’s brought you to Major Case, even though he’s worried that you might be a little too green. (Privately, you kind of agree, but you’ll never, ever say so.) You’re actually going to be working at One PP, which is really exciting and makes your stomach a little tight with pride (you’ll never say that, either). It’s really big, making this squad at your age. Your mother is thrilled, all those second shifts she’s pulled finally paying off for you, and you guess your father might have been too, in some kind of alternate reality in which he had picked a different line of work. You know you’re good at what you do, and you deserve to be here, but you’re going to have a lot to prove.

The squad room has a familiar quiet hum of activity, but it’s spacious and doesn’t smell like urine, which is less familiar. Everyone looks older than you. A big, solidly built guy, bloat settling around the bottom of his face, and a tiny, hard woman beside him, with damaged-looking hair and an intense frown. She seems familiar, somehow, but the details are all wrong. Like she should be taller, or her hips should be wider, or her hair should be longer. Maybe it’s the clothes. You’re still pretty fresh from the academy and you’ve taken your training to heart, so you’re flipping through the catalog of memories: school, the academy, patrol. Nothing’s coming to mind, exactly, and Ross is steering you towards them and the woman looks up, irritated, brushes a piece of hair out of her face.

The chin, you think. It’s something about the tilt of the chin.

Ross is saying something but you’re not paying attention, and then she’s walking toward you, hand outstretched, smiling in the manner of someone unused to the movement of the lips. “Eames,” she says, voice pitched higher than you were expecting. “Glad to have you,” and you hear the quiet rasp in her voice and everything falls away and shifts. The sensible tank top replaced by a corset, the plain black pants now a leather skirt, the makeup ugly and painted, the shoes high and intimidating, the hair long and dark. The smell of cooking oil and sweat, lights dim and unflattering, coats off, mouths on, small fingers pressing into you, the cheap perfume, teeth against your neck, toes curling.

Last time you saw her she was practically naked and you, you writhed against her, in another lifetime, sort of, but her eyes are almost the same: penetrating, hooded, unnervingly sharp, and you remember the way they stared into you, only back then they were a little harder and a little less fragile. You place your hand in Eames’s, feel her cool palm and the slim bones of her fingers, the tension of the muscles under her skin. Her grip is firm and steady and promises an easy ability to break things. You look her in the eye, think _Angie, Angie,_ and say, “Megan Wheeler. It’s good to meet you.”

You think you see a flash of recognition (fear? happiness? desire? none of the above?), but you’re almost certainly imagining the look in Eames’s eyes. If that is her real name. You guess it must be, these days.

*

Logan might be kind of a loose cannon, and might be kind of an asshole, and might be kind of old-school for your taste. But he seems decent, sort of, with every year on the job lined into his face. You note the sad set of his lips and the creases around his eyes and wonder how long it’s going to take you to acquire that look.

“How old are you, anyway?” he asks, at the crappy pool joint he takes you to after your first shift together is over. It’s somewhere in the 88th and it smells like stale beer, which is what both of you are currently drinking. You bought, because the most important things about being a young cop are not things they taught you at the academy and include: sit down, shut up, and take care of the booze. “Thirteen?”

“Twelve,” you tell him seriously, which is a really stupid joke, but it's more important to be self-deprecating than funny, and you think he might go for it a little.

You’re right. He snorts, tells you that you aren’t too bad with a cue, for a tween. And you’ve been talking, a little, about the squad all day, who needs the OT and who might have a little problem with alcohol and all the other important crap Ross isn’t going to tell you because he’s the boss, so it seems safe to ask about Eames.

“Eames,” he repeats, and smiles a little, like he knows a secret. He probably does. “She’s a damn good cop.”

“Yeah?” you ask lazily, affecting your very best bored tone.

Logan sinks a ball, shoots you a twisty-lipped smile. “Came from Vice,” he says. “Undercover.”

“Oh,” you say, and _you fucking idiot,_ you think, like how hard was that to figure out? But you've put in your own time undercover, which means you're a pretty good actor. “Oh," you say again, and after a couple of seconds to recover you don't have any trouble winning the game.


End file.
